Manage Your SEO With WordPress Plugins
You can do your own SEO with WordPress plugins that will make your life easier. The big advantage of a WordPress website is that there are plugins (many are free) that can do a lot of heavy lifting for you. I'd like to share some of these with you. Some are directly associated with optimizing your site; others are critical for supporting your website.
Let's start with the ones that directly help or support your search engine optimization efforts.
Do SEO With WordPress Faster Using Yoast
The most popular plugin for doing on page SEO is Yoast SEO. This plugin easily provides you with the page title, meta description, an on-page analysis and individual indexing options. It breaks down H1/H2 tag optimization, links and even supports canonicalization.
You can set up taxonomies, an XML sitemap, verify Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, as well as determine if you want the search engines to crawl and index your categories and tags. I don't recommend this, because it's enough that your pages and posts are getting crawled and indexed.
The free version is plenty powerful for almost website. This makes optimizing a page or post very easy, as you have red/yellow/green status indicators to let you know if you need to do more optimization.
Another very popular one is the All In One SEO pack. It's fairly similar to Yoast. I use Yoast, so I'm not using this one, but the main difference that I can see is it doesn't have an on-page SEO analyzer. It's a free download as well.
Doing 301 Redirects For SEO With WordPress
Normally, creating a 301 redirect is a job for your friendly neighborhood web dev person. If you're not comfortable editing your .htaccess file (and if you've not done it, you shouldn't be comfortable, as you can shut your site down), but you want to do 301 redirects yourself on the fly, then install and use Redirection.
You can set up 301, 302 or 307 redirects. As your friendly neighborhood SEOer, I only recommend using 301s, as they pass the most page rank. What's interesting about this one is that multiple languages are supporting. English, Italian, Danish, Arabic, Russian and Hindi are some of the choices.
Implement Schema Markup For SEO With WordPress
Schema is an advanced SEO tactic for marking up HTML, to make it easier for the search engines to understand. If your site is easier for the search engine crawlers to understand, there is a good chance you can get higher visibility in search results. I've used the All In One Schema.Org Rich Snippets plugin.
If you're comfortable editing your site's source code, you can always manually install schema, but for those of us who are not coding whizzes, this is a great plugin to use to get as much SEO benefit as possible.
Are you interested in doing your own SEO for your website? You can learn the basics of SEO online or take a live, one-on-one class here in the local area. If you already have a WordPress website, we'll go over it in detail so you can easily manage it yourself!
Until next time, stay safely between the ditches!
All the best to you,
Nancy McDonald
